Data and mobile development sectors saw the highest job growth in the second quarter of 2015

An analysis of job postings on Freelancer.com has revealed that businesses are increasingly turning to mobile, with the number of jobs in the sector increasing by over 25 percent to 22,290.

Freelancer’s latest Fast 50 report, which analysed over 356,000 freelance jobs posted on the platform in the last quarter to highlight the 50 fastest-growing jobs, attributed this growth to the change in Google’s mobile search algorithm in April, which looked to highlight sites that were optimised for mobile, as well as more sites developing their own specific apps.

The number of Android-related projects jumped by over 24 percent in the last quarter to almost 18,500 jobs, while iOS job postings grew 16.4 percent to just over 17,300 projects.

Freelancer’s insights correlate with data released by Melbourne-based tech career marketplace Gooroo in July, which found jobs requiring mobile technology-related skills had a record 9 percent jump in salaries over the month of June. Gooroo found that the skills most in demand include iOS development, mobile design, and Windows Mobile developers.

The change to Google’s mobile algorithm has also been identified as the driver for the growth of WooCommerce jobs. The number of postings related to the ecommerce toolkit for WordPress jumped 750 percent from 129 in the first quarter of 2015 to 1097 in Q2, while the number of Shopify-related projects increased by 31 percent.

The last quarter also saw a significant rise in the number of ‘social commerce’ project postings as businesses look to leverage their social media presences and turn them into selling channels.

While postings related to Facebook advertising fell by almost 12 percent, reflecting dissatisfaction with Facebook’s ‘organic reach’ model, the number of Twitter and Pinterest-related postings increased by 21.9 percent and 22 percent, respectively.

Another big growth area was the data sector, with jobs relating to data entry growing 47.3 percent to over 23,000, data processing jobs up 67 percent to more than 13,000 jobs, and Excel-related jobs up to almost 20,000 postings.

This correlates with the growing appreciation for data analysis in the wider business and IT space; according to the latest Skills and Salary survey from the Institute of Analytics Professionals of Australia, data scientists working in social media are earning an average of $190,000 a year.